Late one night last May, Zachary Turpin, a graduate student in the English department at the University of Houston, sat in bed next to his sleeping wife and daughter, hunting for lost works by Walt Whitman on his laptop. Turpin has spent untold hours poring over journals, letters, and other ephemera in the Walt Whitman Archive, noticing the poet’s distinctive phrases and cadences; that night, he was searching through old newspapers, hoping to find echoes of that prose. In an 1852 issue of the New York Daily Times (the newspaper dropped the word “daily” in 1857), he found a small advertisement for a novel that was to be serialized, anonymously, in another publication, the Sunday Dispatch. The novel was called “The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.” Whitman had used the name Jack Engle in his journals. The ad’s grandiose copy also felt Whitmanian: it promised “an Auto-Biography, in which will be handled the Philosophy, Philanthropy, Pauperism, Law, Crime, Love, Matrimony, Morals, &c., which are characteristic of this great City at the present time.” Turpin wrote to the Library of Congress to request a scan of the newspaper in which the novel first appeared. “As it turns out, Jack Engle is the real thing,” he writes, in the introduction to the novel, which has just been republished by the University of Iowa Press. Whitman wrote the book while he was working as a contractor—he built houses—and writing “Leaves of Grass,” which he published in 1855. Only a single original copy has survived, in the six consecutive numbers of the Sunday Dispatch housed in the Library of Congress.

In a broad sense, the existence of “Jack Engle” isn’t a surprise. Undiscovered writing by Whitman is being discovered all the time. For much of his early life, Whitman was a working journalist. He wrote for more than twenty different newspapers, some of which he founded, and produced reported stories, poems, short fiction, advertisements, and reviews (including, Turpin notes, a few ghostwritten reviews of “Leaves of Grass”). In fact, this is the second lost Whitman book that Turpin has unearthed. In 2015, he discovered “Manly Health and Training,” a fitness manual Whitman published serially in the New York Atlas, in 1858. (This week, Dan Piepenbring has reviewed it for this Web site.) “Jack Engle” also isn’t the only novel Whitman wrote: in 1842, under the initials J. R. S., he published “Franklin Evans,” a temperance novel about a young man who becomes an alcoholic and then breaks the habit.

Turpin points out that, before writing “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman considered alternatives to poetry. He wasn’t sure how best to communicate his vision of life. “Novel?” he wrote, in his journals:

Play?—instead of sporadic characters—introduce them in large masses, on a far grander scale—armies . . . nobody appears on the stage singly—but all in huge aggregates / nobody speaks alone—whatever is said, is said by an immense number.

“That ‘Leaves of Grass’ might have ended up as a novel or a drama is a fact little considered today,” Turpin writes. Similarly, we rarely consider the fact that a rogue asteroid might have ended the world during the Neolithic period; judging from “Jack Engle,” a novel version of “Leaves of Grass” would have been a disaster. Whitman was right to go his own way.

Imagine that Walt Whitman signed up for NaNoWriMo; the result would be “Jack Engle.” The book is a perfectly acceptable nineteenth-century moral thriller, like “Great Expectations” without the genius. The titular protagonist, Jack Engle, is an orphan who, having been rescued from the streets by a kindly butcher and his wife, is now an apprentice in a lawyer’s office. The lawyer, Mr. Covert, has something to hide; eventually, Mr. Wigglesworth, Covert’s elderly alcoholic clerk, reveals Covert’s secret. It turns out that Jack, Covert, and a girl with whom Jack is in love have a secret connection. Someone murdered someone; an inheritance was stolen. In the end, all is made right. Turpin observes that the novel is “part revenge fantasy”: Whitman’s father, Walter, Sr., was a carpenter, and in his journals Whitman writes that his father was once swindled by an evil lawyer whom he calls “Covert the villain.” In “Jack Engle,” the fictional Covert swindles a carpenter, too.

The characters in “Jack Engle” aren’t just linked by a web of crime. The young woman with whom Jack falls in love as a grown man turns out to have helped him out of a scrape when they were both children. And the book does contain moments of lyrical expansiveness. Late in the novel, Jack wanders through the cemetery at Trinity Church; he loses himself among the headstones, reading the inscriptions, and then, looking back to the street, observes,

But onward rolled the broad, bright current, and troubled themselves not yet with gloomy thoughts; and that showed more philosophy in them perhaps than such sentimental meditations as any the reader has been perusing.

Jack is right. It took a poet, Walt Whitman, to express that philosophy, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,The similitudes of the past and those of the future,The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Compared to “Leaves of Grass,” “Jack Engle” feels cynical, claustrophobic, and paranoid. That’s no surprise; in fact, it’s the point. Built into its Dickensian plot is a certain view of the world. In this view, the apparently freewheeling liberalism of urban life is a lie; it’s money and violence that make the city run. Growing up means grasping the subterranean connections that link us and trying, through love, to redeem them. Dickens was able to find poetry in this view of life—an uncanny poetry of doppelgängers, ghosts, and dreamlike revelations. Whitman, in this novel, doesn’t do anything so exalted. But “Jack Engle” reminds us, through contrast, of what he achieved elsewhere: the invention of a hopeful, vibrant poetry of urban coexistence.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.